The present invention relates to medical delivery devices and, more particularly, to an applicator useful for the treatment of skin lesions.
Most skin lesions are benign and do not pose a health risk and as such are typically removed for aesthetic reasons using cryosurgery, lasers or surgical excision. Larger skin lesions or suspected cancerous lesions which require precise removal and histologic analysis are typically removed via surgical excision.
Pharmaceutical compositions that can be used to remove skin lesions are known in the art. For example, international patent application WO 03/028623 describes a pharmaceutical composition that can be used to effectively remove skin lesions while maintaining lesion tissue preserved for subsequent histological analysis. Such a pharmaceutical composition is advantageous in that it enables non-surgical removal of a lesion while preserving lesion tissue cellular architecture.
Topical applicators such as the one described in, for example, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/816,380 can be used to deliver the aforementioned pharmaceutical compositions. However, such applicators cannot provide the coverage and dosing accuracy required for safe and effective treatment of skin lesions.
In order to traverse these limitations, the present inventors devised an applicator that can be used to apply an accurate dose of a tissue-ablative composition to the target skin lesion tissue, in sufficient amount to effectively remove the skin lesion tissue, while minimizing exposure of surrounding healthy tissue to the ablative composition.